About this project

$2,090

pledged of $2,000 goal

48

backers

My project is to bring my on-going process-based public art
installation "Mater Matrix Mother and Medium” to New York’s Cathedral
Church of St. John the Divine for their massive exhibition and symposium “The
Value of Water” in late September 2011 – March 2012.

How it the project began…

Now an on-going project, MMMM began in 2009, originally
commissioned by the Seattle Office of Arts & Cultural Affairs using the
Seattle Public Utilities (our water utility) 1% for Art Funds, as a way to
encourage stewardship, to celebrate and interpret the splendor of Seattle’s
urban creeks and watersheds.

This project began with the communal creation of a 200+ foot
crocheted ‘fiber river’ installation, created in part through a series of over
30 community crochet events held over three months all over Seattle during the
spring of 2009. I taught anyone willing to learn how to crochet, with some
contributing a few minutes of chain stitch and others sticking with me for a
few hours and returning to multiple events around the city.

I then took the fiber "pools" into the forest of
Camp Long, an urban park in Seattle, and spent the next six weeks in-residence
on a ladder crocheting and integrating the river into the trees, a brilliant
blue flow moving through the forest from ground level up to heights of 25 feet.

This artwork is a unique blend of community engagement and
personal inquiry, of site-embedded installation and performance. It embodies
the ancient human practice of acknowledging our own physicality rooted in the
cycles of water and how this forms the very foundation of human community.
Water, both mundane and miraculous, mirrors the everyday meeting of strangers
and the tiny moments that begin to bond us together.

‘MMMM’ becomes on-going

During the installation, many people came to the park,
wanting to continue to crochet even beyond the completion of the installation;
and when I was invited to participate in the “Still Water” exhibition at Agnes
Scott College in Atlanta in late 2009, I realized that there did not have to be
an arbitrary end to continuing the process of making this installation with any
community that wanted to engage with a myriad of topics about water. The issues at stake about water and
community where by no means Seattle-specific, but indeed water issues impact
every person on the planet. The
installation was carefully cut down from the trees in 20-foot sections, packed
and taken to the trees in Atlanta.

And like water, the crocheted water takes the shape of the
vessel that holds it. The
installation has now been done 5 times, each time becoming a very different
shape and engaging in urban to rural environments. To re-create the installation each time, it require a 100
hours of patient shaping from myself and artist Paul Margolis, as we piece back
together cuts and crochet together tears or fibers that have become fragile
from the weather or the sun, creating brighter blue veins running next to
beautifully sun-worn pale blues by adding new materials and thousands of new
stitches. Each time I install the installation
community participation is key; I
am hosted by new communities and gather people together around piles of
recycled yarns and fabrics. And
those small round fiber ‘pools’, often made from left-over scraps from when the
installation is previously cut down, are also integrated back into the
river.

In 2010, with funding from the 4Culture SITE Specific
program, “Mater Matrix Mother and Medium” traveled to sites around the
Northwest, adding more hands and stitches to the flow.

The latest installation…

In 2011, with the invitation to install MMMM in the massive
and awe-inspiring Gothic stone architecture of The Cathedral of St. John the
Divine -- to engage with massive columns of stone as a natural site -- I am
reminded of my earliest desire for the installation, to investigate the notions
of the sacredness of water that every culture throughout history has held, and
how we have lost sight of that sense of water by only relating to it as a
commodity, to the detriment of the planet and those who cannot afford it when
it is privatized. The need and
right to clean water is something we all share.

The River is made up of thousands upon thousands of tiny
moments and movements of individual citizens, integrated and interwoven into
the natural environment. Inspired by the Clooty Well tradition of Celtic
regions – bits of cloth tied to trees around sacred wells bind intention into
action -- MMMM is an exploration of how we ourselves are
both literal and metaphoric manifestations of the living fundamental quality of
water. Our experience of water is both one of intimacy and also of civic
structure.

I need your support to fund this opportunity…

The labor, time away, travel expenses, materials and
shipping required to do this project in New York has and will really add up,
and were barely manageable for my family finances. But a recent sudden medical emergency has meant I have had
to divert all funds to meet those needs and doing this installation has become a
financial hardship for my family.
My hope is that anyone who supports and enjoys my large-scale
installations, or who has supported and enjoyed MMMM will consider making a
small donation; even $1, $5, $10 will add up collectively and take the strain
off my family. I really appreciate
the help and support, it would mean so much to me to be able to do this
installation without creating even more stress for my family.

Kickstarter is not a store.

Pledge $500 or more
About $500

A limited-edition signed 8' x 10' archival ink jet print from MMMM installation and performance images.
A signed 20 page 7'x7' catalog of MMMM installation and performance images.
A set of four signed note cards with images from MMMM installation and performance.
A small wall-hung hank of bright blue crocheted fiber and yarn from the actual installation.

A very big 'Thank You' on a donor side-bar on the MMMM website (http://matermatrixmother.wordpress.com/)